Everyone And No One Won And/Or Lost The Debt Ceiling Fight, Says The Media

One of the best features of the "debt ceiling deal" is that no one seems to be able to agree who won or who lost. Maybe everyone won! Maybe everyone lost! Maybe we'll never know. One would imagine that it would be a useful thing to be able to say that someone definitively benefited from the summer-long fake hostage-crisis kabuki play we just endured, if only because now that we're facing a future of constant fake hostage-crisis kabuki plays substituting for a functional form of governance. But most of our nation's pundits and deep-thought-havers can't agree on who won.

This is, of course, clear evidence that the "debt ceiling deal" is actually so genius that mere mortals cannot hope to understand it without having their puny human brains scorched to a cinder by its divine ineffability. But like we once wrestled over the orbits of heavenly bodies, it falls to our best minds to ponder these great questions. As you'll see from this definitive sampling, they are of several minds on the matter:

Of course, you might wonder if anyone bothered to ask if ordinary Americans won or lost. Here is everything the above articles had to say about that, verbatim:

Krugman: "It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status."

Chait: "The debt ceiling agreement is a horrible piece of legislation. It ratchets down already too-low domestic discretionary spending caps and imposes painful sacrifice on the middle class with little asked of the rich."

And that's it! The rest is horse race politics. This is too be expected, because people in the media do not actually know enough ordinary Americans to care about them or wonder how they are doing.